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Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000, has canceled a second attempt to launch its 30-story New Glenn rocket.
The vehicle was scheduled to take off early Monday, but the company scrapped that plan so engineers could work to resolve a technical problem with the vehicle.
On Monday evening, after about 16 hours of no updates and no word on the exact nature of this issue, Blue Origin took to social media to state that it might make a second attempt during a launch window of three hours which opens at 1:00 a.m. ET Tuesday.
However, a few hours later, Blue Origin revealed that it wouldn’t try to take off overnight after all.
“We are moving the NG-1 launch to Thursday, January 16 at the earliest,” the company said in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
On that day, Blue Origin will have the same three-hour early morning launch window, from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. ET.
The company did not immediately explain why it reversed plans to attempt a New Glenn launch Tuesday morning. But Blue Origin had warned earlier that unfavorable weather conditions at the takeoff site could lead to another scrub.
“Tonight’s poor weather forecast at LC-36 may cause this window to be missed,” the company said in a message released Monday evening.
In the report, Blue Origin also disclosed more details about the problem that engineers sought to fix in the last attempt.
“This morning’s blockage was due to ice forming in an auxiliary power unit purge line that supplies some of our hydraulic systems,” the company said.
A “bleed line” is a pipe or tube that can be used to remove unwanted gases or debris from a rocket system.
This detail was more than Blue Origin offered during its webcast of the launch attempt on Monday. At the time, the company only revealed that engineers were grappling with ” anomalies ,” which is aerospace-speak for problems with the rocket that need to be resolved before giving the final go-ahead for liftoff.
“We are withdrawing from today’s launch attempt to resolve a vehicle subsystem issue,” said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s vice president of space systems.
At one point Monday morning, the countdown slowed to show less than 10 minutes until takeoff, but Blue Origin periodically added more time as engineers worked to resolve outstanding issues. Ultimately, the issues weren’t resolved long enough before the launch window closed at 4 a.m. ET.
A smooth maiden liftoff for New Glenn could be crucial, as the company hopes to collect extensive data from this flight and pave the way for the rocket to quickly impact the global launch industry. New Glenn is the first rocket developed by Blue Origin that aims to be capable of sending satellites into orbit – a feat that will be necessary for any company hoping to challenge SpaceX’s long-standing dominance of the launch market.
Blue Origin has canceled the New Glenn launch ahead of a busy week for spaceflight. Notably, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two lunar landers is scheduled to lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center — adjacent to Cape Canaveral — as early as Wednesday at 1:11 a.m. ET. SpaceX is also scheduled to launch the seventh test flight of its gargantuan Starship rocket on Wednesday.